Joseph Butler Quotes
The principle we call self-love never seeks anything external for the sake of the thing, but only as a means of happiness or good: particular affections rest in the external things themselves.
Butler, Joseph. Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel. J. and J. Knapton, 1726.
Joseph Butler was an English Anglican bishop, theologian, apologist, and philosopher. He was born in Wantage in the English county of Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). He is known, among other things, for his critique of Deism, Thomas Hobbes's egoism, and John Locke's theory of personal identity. Butler influenced many philosophers and religious thinkers, including David Hume, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Henry Sidgwick, John Henry Newman, and C. D. Broad, and is widely considered "as one of the preeminent English moralists." He also played an important, though under appreciated, role in the development of eighteenth-century economic discourse, greatly influencing the Dean of Gloucester and political economist Josiah Tucker.
